Making new friends:

An information literacy trip to Washington DC

Abstract

The article reviews a visit to Washington DC in October 2007 with the main initial purpose of presenting a PPT on the work of the Scottish Information Literacy Project to the (US) National Forum on Information Literacy. The scope of the visit was greatly extended to include meetings with leading US information literacy activists and a visit to the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The meetings and visits showed the US to be well in advance of the UK in the area of media literacy and yielded important information about the situation in higher education. NLM offered very advanced and informative perspectives on health literacy. These finding will be used to inform the work of the Scottish Information Literacy Project and develop new initiatives especially in health and media literacies.